World record solar cell with 44.7% efficiency - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2013-09-world-solar-cell-efficiency.html <comment><USER2> "These solar cells are used in concentrator photovoltaics (CPV), a technology which achieves more than twice the efficiency of conventional PV power plants in sun-rich locations. The terrestrial use of so-called III-V multi-junction solar cells, which originally came from space technology, has prevailed to realize highest efficiencies for the conversion of sunlight to electricity. In this multi-junction solar cell, several cells made out of different III-V semiconductor materials are stacked on top of each other. The single subcells absorb different wavelength ranges of the solar spectrum."

If that isn't a reason to be investing in Space, I don't know what is.

"This world record increasing our efficiency level by more than 1 point in less than 4 months..."

I think we may start to see Moore's Law starting to be applied to Solar Cells. Which actually reminds of a chart on the waves of innovation[1] on the Stanford Tech Entrepreneurship course where we are now seeing the tail of IT and computing and beginning of renewable technologies. The same thing can be said about energy density of batteries(According to Tesla batteries).

[1] Page 5 [https://d2d6mu5qcvgbk5.cloudfront.net/documents/original/69b...](https://d2d6mu5qcvgbk5.cloudfront.net/documents/original/69bd3725d86ab970f2d9509424bb67ae4c832faa.pdf?1377910658)

<comment><USER3> > If that isn't a reason to be investing in Space, I don't know what is.

To justify government research, the results need to be compared to the alternative. Had NASA scientists not been working for the government, they would have been working for private companies engaged doing useful work. The Soviet Union had similar resources to the US, yet their research budget was spent wholly by government, whereas a large portion of the US research during that time was directed by private companies. If you want to restrict the comparison just to the US, ask yourself what would the massive wealth that was dedicated to NASA had produced had it been directed by private interests? What would NASA engineers have produced had they been employed by in Y-Combinator- style startups? (or even big private companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc.)

<comment><USER4> A couple points:

1) It's not like the Soviet Union was a terrible hellhole for research. It had impressive research output for decades.

2) That's almost beside the point, however. Let's take it as a given that more good research, whatever that is, is a worthy goal for a society, and that the market under-invests in it in favor of short term profits. It's obviously not a binary of either 100% government funding or 100% private; it's not even really a one-dimensional continuum, because for the large capital expenditures typically involved in research, the government always has a heavy involvement, either in tax breaks or grants or collaboration. The question is, how do we allocate money to produce the best research? It's undoubtedly at some value that's somewhere between 0% and 100%.

3) There's a whole lot of money floating around now that makes endeavors like SpaceX practicable. That wasn't the case in, say, the Sixties. Even if the arguments for government spending on research were weak now, they'd be stronger in the 1960's, particularly for things like space exploration that required substantial concentrations of capital.

<comment><USER5> As great as SpaceX is, at least half of its funding comes from NASA [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Funding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Funding)

<comment><USER6> I believe that SpaceX would have no problem securing funds from either BRIC, Arabs or even AlQuaeda for that matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those wondering about the significance of this announcement:

As several people have noted, what matters for solar PV isn't _efficiency_ but _cost per Watt_. The maximum _available_ energy is 1W/meter^2 at ground. Single-layer PV efficiency is on the order of about 40%. Mutliple-layer cells can reach a maximum of around 80%.

Even with existing efficiencies, the land space necessary to dedicate to solar power for all electrical energy needs is reasonably small. A percent or so of the Earth's surface. The hard part will be fabricating the PV and/or CSP (concentrated solar thermal power) plants to collect that energy, estimates run well over $100 trillion globally (Jacobson & Delucchi).

A key limiting factor in solar, wind, and other intermittent renewables is _storage_ (or baseload / standby power). Assuming you'd want 7 days' total energy output on reserve, there's quite literally not enough lead in the world to build storage for just the US, let alone the rest of the world. Pumped hydro storage is very efficient, but sites are limited. Biomass similarly doesn't scale to present populations. Geothermal is good for 5-20% of power demands depending on locations (and some places such as Iceland might be able to export energy). Thorium reactors look like a plausible bet but require development. Liquid metal / molten salt batteries (such as Donald Sadoway's designs) look like they're both cheap and abundant enough to make the grade, though they're still under development as well.

Solar power _does_ have its equivalent of Moore's Law: Swanson's Law. Solar PV costs fall by 20% with each doubling of capacity. It's held since the 1970s and looks likely to continue. Effectively, costs half about every 3 years. [http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-c...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily- chart-19/print)

In short: this is mostly of significance for applications in which space and/or weight are at a premium: satellite or possibly solar-powered aircraft (ultralights or airships most likely). For ground-based generation, look for costs to come down further.

And pray for highly effective storage solutions.

<comment><USER8> "The maximum available energy is 1W/meter^2 at ground"

Where are you from, Britain?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight)

""sunshine duration" to mean the cumulative time during which an area receives direct irradiance from the Sun of at least 120 watts per meter"

"The total amount of energy received at ground level from the sun at the zenith is 1004 watts per square meter"

This depends on altitude of course, the maximum is over 1300W in space.

<comment><USER9> I assumed he meant "1 kW" and missed the k.

<comment><USER7> Quite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> this is great but its worth noting that efficiency isn't really what's holding solar production back, its price. few peoples roofs are crammed with PV to the point where they can't fit more in.

<comment><USER11> This is the fundamental problem with PV. Compared to cheap natural gas, there just isn't much future in it

<comment><USER12> No Future?

That might be true, except for that rather large elephant in the room call _human-induced climate_ change.

<comment><USER13> yes and PP presupposes "cheap natural gas." as witnessed by recent fracking- induced earthquakes [1] there may be very little cheap natural gas in the future.

[1][http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6142/1225942](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6142/1225942)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Odd that the figure says that the efficiency was 44.7% +/\- 3.1% -- given the big error bar, how could they say they'd increased 1% in 4 months? Measure it again, who knows what you'll get!

<comment><USER15> ERROR BARS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY

<comment><USER16> Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER17> The +/\- 3.1% is relative to the efficiency. The way to read it is: 0.447 +/\- 3.1%, where now it's more obvious that it translates to more like 0.447 +/\- 0.014.

<comment><USER14> Even if it really means 0.447 +/\- 0.014, an increase of 0.01 is not very significant!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe I missed it in the article, but what was considered a good efficiency prior to this?

<comment><USER13> someone on wikipedia has been maintaining a beautiful image of the history of solar cell efficiency for various technologies.. let's see if this has been added yet. It looks 1. No, and 2. There was a recent discovery by Sharp of 44.4%.

Main page: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PVeff%28rev130923%29a.jpg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PVeff%28rev130923%29a.jpg)

<comment><USER19> Image is credited to _L.L. Kazmerski_ of the _National Renewable Energy Laboratory_ (NREL), Golden, CO.

Have a look at the types of markers shown on the image key again. While vast amounts of resources are being dumped on efficient electricity extraction through expensive, advanced manufacturing processes, some are looking at going back to organics, which NREL classes as 'emerging'. Apparently hybrid organic/electrical photovoltaics date back to 1958, and can produce 11.1% (roughly 1/3-1/2 of currently available manufactured products) efficiency while remaining cheap to produce at high volumes. Mitsubishi is one of the research leaders.

More at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_solar_cell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_solar_cell)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> While nearly 45% is impressive, I'd rather see "cheap as paint" solar cells at 10% efficiency that are football fields in size.

Put them on every commercial rooftop and all that free space we have out west in the USA.

<comment><USER21> It is an interesting challenge for a PV-curious homeowner - if efficiency is increasing, and capital costs are dropping, and assuming that rooftop cells might eventually need replacing - it is better to cover one's roof all at once with current tech, or to start smaller and plan to add new panels over time until the roof is full, and then start replacing old panels?

Local variables would probably predominate, along with loan/lease/financing and ability to resell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So when does solar power become cheap and efficient enough that it's a real game changer? It seems like the numbers have gotten a lot better in recent years, at least in terms of efficiency.

<comment><USER23> Solar is already cheaper in most places provided you have net metering, which is a subsidy. But there's a limit to how many people can use the grid for free.

<comment><USER24> Don't forget to take into account that grid connected solar houses feed excess power produced into the grid, there's no free about it, these are essentially micro power stations which enhance the grid.

<comment><USER23> You're missing the point. The free part is they're selling back power at retail rates. In net metering if you generate as much power as you use you don't pay any per kWh charges. Where I live the power company is selling power to consumers for about 22 cents per kWh. From normal wholesale vendors it's buying power for somewhere around seven cents, but it's buying buying power from net metering people for 22 cents.

That's where the "using the grid for free" part comes in. People who purchase wholesale-generated power are paying the power company's overhead, whereas the net metering people aren't.

<comment><USER25> In addition, the home owners are selling a electricity at a fixed time and buying it back with flexibility, not taking into account the spot price of the electricity (which is going to lower drastically during peak solar times over the next few decades).

If every home owner installed sufficient solar power to be neutral under net metering, the grid would have to be maintained, with traditional generation supplied at off peak solar times _at no cost to the home owner_.

If that doesn't show how heavy a subsidy net metering is, I don't know what will. It's not sustainable and should never be used to price out solar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Good on them. In reality, however, fuel from the sun is free and we have unlimited land. Getting the cost down and economies of scale are what everyone is really focussed on.

<comment><USER23> Who has unlimited land?

<comment><USER26> I'm in Australia. We have unlimited land and enough sun to power the solar system.

<comment><USER23> You guys might be one of the few countries with effectively unlimited land. But remember the power has to get from where it's generated to where it's needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm going to turn to Hacker News, as I always do, for context: what would 50% efficiency mean?

<comment><USER28> Short answer is that more of the solar insolation that hits Earth gets converted into electricity. So on the equator its about 1kW per square meter, in North America closer to 700W sq Meter, and converted at 50% you would start at 350W per sq meter, which after rectification might be 300W per square meter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Guys, anyone knows the sense of "measured at a concentration of 297 suns."? is sufficient much less energy to transform the earth in a giant BBQ.

<comment><USER30> My question too - I wonder how it would perform in normal sunlight.

<comment><USER31> Concentrator cells make a number of tradeoffs in order to make their performance as high as possible (and keep from melting, etc.). I would guess around 22% efficient in one-sun AM1.0; that's about what other concentrator cells in this upper tier do.

If it's slightly cloudy, I could see efficiencies dropping to the single digits, as each of these cells is actually four different cells all wired in series, each sensitive to different wavelengths of light. If the blue drops out, the corresponding cell on the top of the stack acts as a resistor (and it can even burn out, being so thin).

Solar cell efficiency records (particularly for concentrator applications) are like discovering new transuranic elements- extremely useful and interesting at first, then significantly diminishing returns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Now combine this with IBM's research to collect most of the energy lost to heat production and push the efficiency up to 80% [http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/ibms-solar-tech- is-80...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/ibms-solar-tech- is-80-efficient-thanks-to-supercomputer-know-how/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Is the composition of this one solar cell from 4 subcells of any significance? Is it just 4 for a reason?

<comment><USER31> Imagine you have commissioned 100 different manufacturers to make you 100 different arbitrary Lego knockoffs; each manufacturer picks a color, thickness, and a peg pitch (spacing between the pegs). Each manufacturer only makes exactly one kind. Some manufacturers' legos will fit together, and some won't.

Some manufacturers make theirs very cheaply and in mass quantities, and some will take years to deliver a very small number at very high prices.

As a solar cell designer, you want to make a stack of these legos to form a rainbow. It has to go from blue on the top to red on the bottom, and it has to stack together without too much force.

Think of a brand-X terrestrial Home Depot crystalline solar cell as just yellow lego bricks. They aren't the whole rainbow (and green would actually be a closer match to sunlight if you could only pick one color) but they're cheap.

Gallium Arsenide legos are green, but they're really hard to make. Germanium legos are red, and it turns out that the green Gallium Arsenides fit on them really well. Yellow Silicon ones, on the other hand, don't fit well with either.

So that brings us to two. Indium Phosphide legos are blue and so are Gallium Phosphide legos. But neither of those fit well on the green Gallium Arsenide; one's lego pins are too dense, the other too sparse. It took a long time for a manufacturer to come up with the right blend, thickness, and color, but they were able to come up with a lego that is blue, made from a mix called Indium Gallium Phosphide, and stacks nicely on top of the green Gallium Arsenide. So that's 3.

The fourth layer might be Indium Gallium Arsenide Nitride (let's just call it orange), shoved between the existing layers; somehow making a mix of a good quality lego, but one that makes the right color, right thickness, and right pin pitch.

Now to translate to real physics: The pin pitch is the lattice parameter of each of these crystals, or the distance between individual atoms. If you attempt to epitaxially grow (grow on top of in the same fashion) a different compound than what already exists there, it tends to work ok if the lattice parameters are close. If they're radically different, you can get growth but it's highly disordered and ends up making a lousy layer and a lousy solar cell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> recent improvements in all solid state dye-sensitized solar cells show more potential for lowering the cost of solar energy.

</comment><comment><USER35> When will the world run out of the "III-V semiconductor materials" ? And which nation or corporation currently controls the largest deposits?

<comment><USER13> haha a legit question, but i guess you got downvoted because you could have researched it and shared it? dunno.

anyway. not a chem dude at all, but it appears III-V semis are when you combine: "III-V compound semiconductors obtained by combining group III elements (essentially Al, Ga, In) with group V elements (essentially N, P , As, Sb). This gives us 12 possible combinations; the most important ones are probably GaAs, InP GaP and GaN." [1]

In other words, the materials in general are: Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Antimony, Arsenic, Bismuth, Boron, Aluminum, Gallium, Indium and Thallium.

I imagine nitrogen, phosphorus and aluminum are the easiest to find generally throughout the world.

China appears to control 90% of antimony [2] and its price seems to have gone up 700% over the last decade.

Arsenic seems to have major supply issues, one of the most critical in terms of scarcity according to [3] and [4]. Nevertheless, the price has gone down over the last 100 years significantly and according to this source is less scarce than it was a century ago: [5]

Bismuth is "relatively rare" but doesn't appear to be scarce. it is found mostly in Peru Japan Mexico, Canada, Bolivia and not in the USA. [6]

remaining elements are left as an exercise to the reader.

[1] [http://www.tf.uni- kiel.de/matwis/amat/semitech_en/kap_2/back...](http://www.tf.uni- kiel.de/matwis/amat/semitech_en/kap_2/backbone/r2_3_1.html) [2][http://www.tf.uni- kiel.de/matwis/amat/semitech_en/kap_2/back...](http://www.tf.uni- kiel.de/matwis/amat/semitech_en/kap_2/backbone/r2_3_1.html) [3][http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2012/a...](http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2012/acs- presspac-february-8-2012/arsenic-criticality-poses-concern-for-modern- technology.html) [4][http://environment.yale.edu/news/article/arsenic-supply- at-r...](http://environment.yale.edu/news/article/arsenic-supply-at-risk/) [5][http://theunbrokenwindow.com/2010/03/08/running-out-of- resou...](http://theunbrokenwindow.com/2010/03/08/running-out-of-resources- arsenic-edition/) [6][http://www.carondelet.pvt.k12.ca.us/Family/Science/Nitrogen/...](http://www.carondelet.pvt.k12.ca.us/Family/Science/Nitrogen/bismuth.html)</comment></comment>


Bible Lobbyist: We Can't Print Bibles in America Anymore - <AUTHOR> https://mattstoller.substack.com/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion has been flagged:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21984703](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21984703)</comment>


NPM integration for Rails - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/endenwer/npm-rails <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN".

Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)</comment>


Dropbox Chief to Join Elite Ranks of Idea-to-I.P.O. Founders - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/technology/dropbox-chief-poster-child-tech-founder-making-it-big.html <comment><USER2> For anyone who hasn't watched it, checkout the original demo videos made by Drew himself.

Video1 (Probably earlier version) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAnJjXriIcw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAnJjXriIcw)

Video2 (Better than Video1, more witty and well made.) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QmCUDHpNzE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QmCUDHpNzE)

It's pretty impressive and the product then looked pretty polished (though minimalistic as it is even today) that even after 11 years, it hasn't gone through much changes. One thing that is interesting is that many people use Dropbox as a poster child of MVPs and Lean methodology, but given the possible effort and polish that Drew had put into the product, I am not sure we can call the beta version as an MVP.

<comment><USER3> I think it's fair to say that those videos you linked are not examples of MVP / Lean, given how sophisticated the product was throughout the demo. The example that I've always heard (and couldn't find a link to now, so might not be true) was that, while Dropbox was in YC, they put up a landing page and a teaser video that only explained what the product would be once released, without even releasing it. That video generated a lot of buzz and signups, which was a lean way to validate the idea that people wanted the product.

Seeing as I can't find the video I imagine this story might've been embellished over the years, so if anyone was here for that I'd love to be corrected.

<comment><USER4> > I think it's fair to say that those videos you linked are not examples of > MVP / Lean, given how sophisticated the product was throughout the demo.

The reason it's considered MVP is because the video is faked.

Source: Eric Ries

<comment><USER2> If it's a fake, it's a damn good fake!.

<comment><USER4> True!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He came to speak at MIT while I was there, and I remember two things that stuck out. He's a really unassuming guy and smiled at everyone he met in the hallways(have to kind of enjoy when the market rewards humble people), and he also fielded the question "where do I find a technical cofounder" to which he had a great one word answer "codecademy".

<comment><USER6> Why is that a great answer?

<comment><USER7> Because teaching yourself coding and attempting to do it yourself should be done or at least attempted before hand . A bunch of nontechnical cofounders think that coding is scary or they can't learn it . You will burn a bunch of time attempting to cofounder date than actually get the job done.

There are exceptions such as already getting funding or having background knowledge or an inspiring vision .

<comment><USER4> The number of exceptions is mathematically very close to 0%

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is great. I remember the initial hacker news post. I remember how I thought it was trivial and that in the best case Microsoft and google would eat them. Glad to see that I was wrong. From that perspective I'm trying to figure out why I thought that despite all evidence to the contrary. And how I can avoid that type of mistake going forward.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know what kinda of watch he's wearing in that picture?

</comment><comment><USER10> No offense to Drew Houston.

> At M.I.T., he joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, which he has said > helped him learn how to build a corporate culture.

> Dropbox also developed a reputation as an unwelcoming workplace for women. > "Some of the things they've been struggling with are how to balance Dropbox > being a fun place to work with accusations of having a frat boy atmosphere," > Mr. Mann said.

Not much of a plot twist there!

<comment><USER11> When people talk about things you can't say in tech companies, being in a greek organization is one of them. I would never advertise the fact that I was in a fraternity for fear of how people would perceive me. People have a tendency to blame a group instead of the individual for bad behavior. I don't need my workplace to be "fun", I'd rather do interesting work with smart people. I can have fun when I'm not working.

<comment><USER12> >I would never advertise the fact that I was in a fraternity for fear of how people would perceive me. People have a tendency to blame a group instead of the individual for bad behavior.

There's good reason. Fraternities are the exact opposite of meritocracy. Their very reason for existence, in fact, is to subvert meritocracy through cronyism and nepotism for those who can afford it. Because of this, people engaged in strictly meritocratic work (science and engineering) find that whole world repulsive.

<comment><USER13> > Because of this, people engaged in strictly meritocratic work (science and > engineering) find that whole world repulsive.

Richard Feynman, John Bardeen, Linus Pauling, and Kary Mullis were all in frats. That's just from 5 minutes of googling famous American scientists I could think of, I'm sure there's more.

<comment><USER14> Using Feynman as an example doesn't help your case: [https://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/sexist- feynman-...](https://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/sexist-feynman- called-a-woman-worse-than-a-whore/)

That said, I don't think we can judge people in the past using modern ethical values and it doesn't take away from his achievements.

<comment><USER13> The argument was "engineers/scientists find fraternities repulsive". Arguing that a top scientist was a jerk/misogynist/racist/sexist/whatever doesn't refute that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook is giving $1k to every employee - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/17/21183513/facebook-giving-1000-dollar-bonuses-every-employee-coronavirus-mark-zuckerberg <comment><USER2> The much bigger news here is that they're suspending performance reviews for this half and giving everyone an "exceeds expectation" rating. This is _huge_ for working parents who are having to give up family responsibilities just to grind for their employer.

<comment><USER3> To the point. It removes the pressure when pressure is everywhere else.

I hate defending FB, but these measures are really good.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, even though a lot of people rightly or wrongly criticize Facebook, I don't think most of the criticism has been about their treatment of employees. I'm pretty sure it's always been pretty great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Facebook is giving $1k to every employee_

And $100 million in cash grants and ad credits to small businesses in 30 countries.

[https://www.facebook.com/business/boost/grants](https://www.facebook.com/business/boost/grants)

#idontspeakforfb

</comment><comment><USER6> Not sure why there are so many negative comments. This is a win and sets a great example that hopefully other companies can follow.

Yes, software engineers at FB have probably no (or very little) problem working from home and get their $200k salary, but this is a win regardless.

<comment><USER7> > Not sure why there are so many negative comments

It's seen as rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. _the median compensation for a Facebook employee is $228,651_ That's not a group facing huge financial issues which 1k is going to do much about.

I am not saying it is a poor use of 45 million dollars, but I can see people viewing this as meaningless.

<comment><USER8> Eh, imagine Facebook hired remote workers. I bet they would be fine giving them 1k upfront for tech setup

<comment><USER7> I suspect it was to offset the costs of setting up a home office. And in that context it seems like a completely reasonable thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The title misses the other, and more impactful/unprecedented change of giving everyone "exceeds" rating and skipping perf review for them (except for those high performers who will get separate review).

That does far more than $1000 to relieve everyone and make it fair for those who have to take care of others in the family during such time.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, this change is easily worth something on the order of $20k this year and then $10k per year for the three following years for every engineer who wouldn't have otherwise achieved this rating. It's huge.

Interestingly, I assume they're doing this because it means they can skip the performance cycle entirely. That's a good way to save process. It's gonna harm some people who were on track to do better than exceeds, though. (On average it should help people.)

<comment><USER11> > It's gonna harm some people who were on track to do better than exceeds, > though.

There's no news about this yet, but I've heard that people that are on track to do better than exceeds will likely still have a review so that they don't miss out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I work for FB and wanted to shed some more light on this

Several employees are pledging to donate that to charities, including me. Internally, employees are mobilizing to help others in need, via fundraising and other causes. It's a beautiful sight.

FB is giving away around $100 million to 30K small businesses. Zuckerberg has pledged to match up to $20 million in donations. And he's pledged money via his philanthropic arm to fight COVID-19.

Stop complaining and start doing. What did you do today to help others ?

</comment><comment><USER13> > _It's not clear if Facebook will also give a bonus to contractors who are > content moderators._

Let me guess: it doesn't.

Have Facebook contractors been given the right to work from home yet?

<comment><USER14> By definition, don't all contractors have to generally not work from an office? Otherwise it's very easy to deem them full-time employees and they are entitled to benefits. Not sure of Facebook's specific situation or what roles they are contracting, but I'd imagine most of them aren't at HQ.

<comment><USER15> They're just permatempts. Every company has them these days. The content moderators specifically work out of an Accenture office and aren't really contracted to facebook. They are Accenture's w-2 employees.

<comment><USER16> > They are Accenture's w-2 employees.

Then Accenture should be giving them allowance to work from home, not facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It might be a gesture at a company like Amazon where they employ many low paid workers, but at FB a high proportion of workers will see this as a 0.2-1% bonus.

The 'exceeds' performance review will have a much bigger impact on income.

<comment><USER5> _The 'exceeds' performance review will have a much bigger impact on income._

Not until mid-September bonus payout, though.

<comment><USER18> Exceeds bonus: great!

Not having to write perf reviews: priceless!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Damn, say what you will about FB, that's a gesture and a half.

<comment><USER20> Why? It's a fraction of a percent of most employees' annual pay, which presumably they are still receiving. If anything, it's like giving everyone a tiny bonus for some PR. At least that's how I read it.

If they gave that money to contractors, that would actually be a gesture of good will. Honestly I feel like they'd be better off only giving it to contractors and ignoring their employees, who are already extremely well-paid.

<comment><USER21> If you read the article you will see they are also giving every essentially a full bonus irrespective of performance. Depending on individual agreements that could be a significant sum so it's definitely not a fraction of a percent of anybody's annual pay.

<comment><USER20> Facebook has always given out bonuses, that's not news. The news is giving every employee $1000, and I'm saying that's a horrible decision on Facebook's part and they should be shamed for it. They should use that money to help those in need, or just not do anything at all.

Facebook has always been known for its unethical decisions, but this is just dumb - unless their goal is to get some incredibly superficial PR for what is a very small amount of money to them (tens of millions is a rounding error compared to their quarterly revenue).

<comment><USER21> You've failed to comprehend the article and now you've failed to comprehend my comment. Facebook isn't simply 'giving bonuses'. Bonuses are based on performance. It's rare at a company that you will get 100% of your performance bonus. In this case Facebook is giving everyone a high performance score (and therefore a high % of their bonus) regardless of how well they performed.

For perspective: someone on a $100k salary with a 10% bonus might normally expect $4-8k bonus. Not it'll be $9-10k. Depending on how high the salaries are and how large the bonus %'s are the difference could be quite a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _the median compensation for a Facebook employee is $228,651_

 _It's not clear if Facebook will also give a bonus to contractors who are content moderators_

Kudos to Facebook for trying to help their team weather the storm. Hopefully the folks who need it most get the bonuses as well.

<comment><USER23> It may be tough for a company to provide bonuses directly to contractors (especially those that are earmarked for buying equipment to wfh). FB has said that they have agreements with all the contracting companies that they work with that even as people stay home they will continue to get paid their normal pay (even if they can do nearly no work from home, e.g. including food service contractors). They haven't said what that means, but you can be sure that pay isn't coming out of the contracting companies pockets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't know what the deal is, but I feel like the cynicism on HN has just constantly ramped up over the past couple of years. I actively feel worse after reading the comments on a lot of articles posted on here, and it's just not an enjoyable experience.

There was another article posted recently about a CEO raising the minimum salary of all of his employees to $70,000 and cutting his personal costs to afford it, and even with this gesture there were many negative comments and conspiracy theories about it.

<comment><USER10> Seriously, I don't know why people are trying so hard to find the negative here in a thousand bucks bonus to all employees. The top ranked comment in this entire thread is currently "But why? [...] What do they need the extra money for?" Talk about crab mentality. If your employer gives you extra money, you take it! Good on Facebook for redistributing some vanishingly tiny fraction of their cash to their employees in this time of crisis.

<comment><USER16> Because life is so easy that people need a crisis. This is especially true in the United States, where life is exceptionally easy.

<comment><USER25> Life is only easy for about 1% of the country... Most of us are barely surviving

<comment><USER26> This isn't meant to diminish the plight of those suffering in America, but it takes approximately $32,000 to be in the top 1% for worldwide incomes. Much of America's poor are relatively wealthy when you consider the global scale.

I don't know that there's any object lesson in that, but it's worth remembering that most of us live positively enveloped in so much privilege that we take for granted how much more difficult the struggle could be.

<comment><USER27> Except very rarely can you live worldwide while earning that. Someone on that much money is going to be struggling in Sydney, not the sort of person you would call the 1% to their face. It's actually around the legal minimum wage not including annual/sick leave and retirement benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Man, not fan of company toward public. But these acts are changing my view and their work to improve mis-spread of information.

I feel like they are becoming a new company (growth from teenage years I guess).

</comment><comment><USER29> Proud to work here. Confused by the all downvotes.

</comment><comment><USER30> But why? Aren't most of their employees going to still be making their salary anyways? What do they need the extra money for?

The people in the economy that really need the money are not the people working at Facebook.

I mean, congrats to Facebook employees, I just don't understand why.

<comment><USER3> Because working from home with kids unable to leave house produces extra expenses for child care (switching from daycare to babysitter will be expensive) etc.

If you do not do that, you need to cut hours, which reduce your income.

What FB does here is to comfort their worried employees with some money, push the overall moral and mitigate some of the impacts ppl feel.

You can replace babysitting with caregiving, being sick, etc.

<comment><USER13> > _If you do not do that, you need to cut hours, which reduce your income._

Are Facebook employees paid by the hour?

<comment><USER31> They have a lot of contractors, who are. And there is (used to be) a caste like energy on how contractors were viewed as opposed to actual FTEs.

<comment><USER32> As far as I can tell, contractors aren't included in this initiative.

<comment><USER33> As far as I can tell, they are included.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Google is being flexible about letting employees not use their PTO while school is out, which IMO is a far better thing to give.

</comment><comment><USER35> My employer, Mozilla, is reimbursing employees up to $1,000 towards equipment for working from home [0], childcare, etc. The guidance has been for employees to be reasonable and for those approving expenses to be flexible.

[0] The roughly half of the company that works from home already got to expense setting up their home office when they were hired, so this mainly helps the people who were working from a company office.

</comment><comment><USER36> Meanwhile Facebook relies heavily on contractors for catering, security, cleaning, and content moderation. The first 3 of these will be severely cut back during the virus as offices are closed.

<comment><USER11> > The first 3 of these will be severely cut back during the virus as offices > are closed.

Facebook are still paying all contractors their regular pay, even if they're not needed at the moment:

> Facebook will pay contingent workers that cannot work due to reduced > staffing requirements during voluntary work from home, when we close an > office, when we choose to send an employee home, or when they are sick

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/facebook-commits-to- paying...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/facebook-commits-to-paying- contingent-workers-affected-by-corporate-coronavirus-response/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > It's not clear if Facebook will also give a bonus to contractors who are > content moderators.

It seems like they are the most at-risk, considering they are not paid as much as all the developers.

<comment><USER38> I work with some of them in Greece. They have monthly contract extensions and are paid by day, no sick leave. Most offices have skeleton crew now. Technically it is not fb, but agency who employs them.

<comment><USER37> > Technically it is not fb, but agency who employs them.

And that's part of the problem, IMO. It enables Facebook to say "we're giving these protections to _all our employees_ " which is technically correct but leaves out many people who labor for Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Disclaimer: Former FB engineering employee.

I have rarely seen a greater bunch of whining here. Don't like FB as a business? Fine, I don't really either. But they take care of their people. If there must be an outpouring of whining, maybe direct it at those other companies that also have cash on hand and _aren't_ giving some of it to employees?

</comment><comment><USER40> Shopify did the same. Supposedly to help employees to buy stuff they need for working from home. It's really a pair of decent monitors + a good usb hub.

<comment><USER41> That seems oddly tax inefficient. If you're buying equipment for work it should be expensed through the business. You shouldn't be paying income tax on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Bonuses just got issued at most if not all SV companies, I work at Uber and ours checked in 3/13, so more money is the last thing SV techies need at this time. The funds should have been directed to orgs supporting freelancers etc

<comment><USER23> What does one have to do with the other?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> fwiw, after taxes, looking at $600-$800 depending on tax category.

</comment><comment><USER44> Are the contractors who serve food or drive the employee shuttles also receiving this?

<comment><USER23> Probably not (possibly giving bonuses skirts the contractor-employee line, idk). But they are still getting paid even if they are sitting at home all day when the cafeteria shuts down and the shuttles stop running.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> What if Facebook gave a $1,000 to every user... Now that would be news...

<comment><USER46> Yes, botnet operators would love that.

<comment><USER45> Require a photo ID and tax documents.

<comment><USER47> And then the headline becomes "Facebook wants to harvest your ID and tax documents"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> How about giving out some masks which are more effective than just money? We can't even find any masks to buy in the Bay Area, and we are at risk.

<comment><USER49> Is it possible that some FB employees have problems that can be solved with cash, but not with N95 filters? And where is FB going to get these mask, and how would they distribute them to their employees working from home?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> this sounds tone-deaf. Much better to give that money to employees other companies who actually need it.

<comment><USER8> You want... Facebook... To give 1000 dollars... To every employee of some other unnamed company...

<comment><USER50> this could be e.g. in the form of food delivery vouchers etc, speficically aimed to keep small businesses running

<comment><USER51> They're doing something like that here: [https://www.facebook.com/business/boost/grants](https://www.facebook.com/business/boost/grants)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This will not do anything substantial. When monetizing the debt, the Fed should instead helicopter money to everyone. Everyone can then be a millionaire like in the Weimar Republic.

</comment><comment><USER53> Leaked video of Zuck making the decision: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYHO7FRsQAA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYHO7FRsQAA)

</comment><comment><USER54> If Facebook actually wanted to help, they would instead give every employee a $1,000 donation budget. Pick a charity and Facebook will donate on your behalf.

Why give an extra $1,000 to someone who is still making their salary? Or you know at least cut it off at people making over $100,000 or something.

</comment><comment><USER55> > as the median compensation for a Facebook employee is $228,651

Meanwhile in silicon valley people making an average of $228k a year get a $1,000 for no reason. They are on salary already and $1,000 doesn't move the needle for them. This is absurd.

<comment><USER56> I thought FB was global, and doubt that all of their staff make that much?

If it doesn't help, what have we lost, other companies are doing nothing, it seems. [https://about.fb.com/company-info/](https://about.fb.com/company- info/) says 85 locations around the World.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Learning to Launch – Free Book - <AUTHOR> https://learningtolaunch.co/read <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, so glad to finally ship this book.

Just over 12 months ago Mike and I realised we had a problem. Despite working on side projects for months on end again and again, we continually failed to launch anything at all, meaning all our hard work went to waste. To fix this Mike suggested we try and launch six projects in six months.

I thought he was mad, we couldn't launch one project in unlimited time, so I wasn't sure how we'd manage to do six in six. But something about the challenge resonated with us both, so we went for it.

Now 12 months on we've launched 7 projects in the past year and are now launching our eighth, this book on what we learnt.

The book is specifically aimed at people who want to get better at shipping side projects, not those who have already mastered this and want to learn how to do the marketing, growth etc. It's our belief that just shipping something is hard enough, so we wanted to write a book just about that.

The book is being released online for free, with no email wall. Anyone can read it.

We'd love your feedback, if you have thoughts/questions at all please share them here, and we've also setup a Typeform to help gauge how useful the book is and how we can improve it. [https://contrast.typeform.com/to..](https://contrast.typeform.com/to..).

As always we tracked our time with the book, so you can see how long it took at the end :)</comment>


O'Reilly - Top 2013 ebooks and videos for 50% off - <AUTHOR> http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/best-of-oreilly-dotd.do?code=DEAL&cmp=tw-na-books-videos-info-authornote_best_of_2013

<comment><USER2> Informit.com (Pearson, Addison-Wesley Professional, Prentice Hall etc.) has a similar 40% to 50% off deal until January 31st:

[http://www.informit.com/promotions/best-of-2013-ebook- sale-1...](http://www.informit.com/promotions/best-of-2013-ebook-sale-139584)

This includes the ebook versions of The C++ Programming Language 4th Edition, Programming in Objective-C 6th Edition, Peopleware and several other titles.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Interactive Data Visualization" is available online for free [http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000345](http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000345)

<comment><USER4> And Mastering Perl is on there too! Very cool find john2x!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do we need a story submitted every time O'Reilly has a ebook sale which seems like is every other day? This is nothing but an unpaid advertisement and should be down voted off the front page.

Anyone who actually is interested in being alerted on their deals probably is on their mailing list already.

<comment><USER6> Also, if you are a registered member there is always the buy one get one, buy two get two free and so on deal. So essentially you always get 50% of on O'Reilly which is great but when you know this all other deals become redundant... :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone here have The Linux Programming Interface in ebook form? In the past, I've preferred to have reference style books in hard copy because there's nothing quite like thumbing through them. I've had my eye on this book for a while and at $40 it seems tempting even, as an ebook.

<comment><USER2> I bought the paper book and the ebook (pdf, epub, mobi) from No Starch Press through this link for $70 last year:

[http://man7.org/tlpi/purchase.html](http://man7.org/tlpi/purchase.html)

I didn't end up doing as much Linux C programming as I expected but for the little I did I found the ebook version more useful -- the paper book is hefty and doesn't travel well. It looks great in my bookcase next to Knuth's TAOCP though.

O'Reilly seems to source their ebook files from the original publishers so I assume their version is identical.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review our startup, Seekier.com - A search sharing network - <AUTHOR>

http://seekier.com
Hello HN,
We just launched a new search sharing service, named Seekier, which allows users to share their searches instantly with other friends and create discussions and knowledge bases around these shared searches. We hope that this becomes a gateway for users to help each other discover more through suggestions from those following them. We also hope this allows users to gain a greater glimpse into the personal interests of their friends. Our profile pages are located at seekier.com/roosh and seekier.com/michael. We welcome you to try out the site out for yourselves and would appreciate any sort of feedback. Thank you HN. <comment><USER2> Here's my honest opinion; it might be a little discouraging, but don't worry, I'm just some kid typing stuff on the internet.

First, let's discuss the aesthetics of the site. The site looks like a real start-up website, and I immediately classify it as "something I should look into" rather than "spam", "boring", etc. So, that's good.

I didn't like the "feed" of searches that is the primary focus of the page. Since your summary didn't adequately explain to me what your service does (well, technically it did, but I just didn't "get" it), this stream of searches was rather confusing. They were all from several hours ago, by people who I'm not the least bit interested in, had no comments, and everytime I would think about clicking on anything it would abruptly move as the next equally annoying search thing faded in. Also, it's buggy as hell. It looks somewhat nice, but doesn't show off anything of value. Rather, it makes your site look like a ghost town. Sign up for a ghost town? No thanks.

I would suggest to populate your site with some interesting content (even if you have to fake making users to do it), and show me the most interesting discussions. That would get me interested: "Wow! People are actually discussing stuff that others are searching for!" Rather than "Uh, a stream of mundane searches? All several hours old, in no apparent order, with no comments... what's the point of this?"

Another thing I noticed is that I kept wanting to scroll up, thinking that the color horizontal bar was cut off content. While this was just a minor annoyance, it was still annoying. I also felt lost, and somewhat betrayed, when what looked like the major navigation of the site was actually adwords.

Now, let's talk about the idea. I don't feel like you're creating something that people want. I'm not the world's best Googler, but 99% of the time I manage to find what I'm looking for. The other 1%, I'll try on other search engines, or ask people on FB, whatever. I also use <http://www.moreofit.com> (shameless plug) to search for things if I already have one good example of what I'm looking for. So, your site is not likely to help me find things.

Now, are my search queries something I want as a point of conversation? Generally, no. I could only imagine this being useful in some sort of SEO forum where I'm interested in the rankings of the results... in which case I'd just create a new thread in that forum.

I'm not convinced at all that "search queries" are a topic people want to talk about. Even if it were the world's most amazing point of conversation, why would I use your site to discuss my search queries rather than the thousands of other already-established and populated commenting systems online? Why not just post a status update on facebook, or twitter, or post on a forum I frequent, or Reddit, HN, etc?

I just think to myself... of all the things that one would want to talk about online, is "search query" really at all popular? And, if so, what technological benefit does your site have that makes me want to talk about "search queries" at your site, rather than on any other of 1000 forums? It's such an absurd concept that in retrospect it's the reason why I didn't "get" what your site did.

If you could show off some examples of interesting discussions centered around search queries and put them on the frontpage, I might have a completely different opinion, and maybe a "search query enthusiast" niche could be cultivated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, we're currently lacking much users, but we're hoping that as we attract more users, more insightful conversations and connections will be cultivated around shared searches. Here's one quick example of a conversation cultivated from a shared search: <http://seekier.com/roosh/seek/248>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Firstly, county should be country :). I like the idea, it's pretty nifty and I can see it being useful, but I think your approach is wrong. When I go to search for something, I just type it into my address bar and search, I never go to google.com and then search for something, I haven't done that in about three years :), so as you can probably tell, I don't really want to go through seekier.com every time I want to search for something.

So here's how I would approach it. Why not make a browser extension that does everything in the background, this way, I can use the service without having to run over to the site every time I want to look for something, I'd probably forget about doing it altogether after an hour :). If you decide to take this approach though, make sure you put a big button somewhere that allows you to to turn the service off if you decide you want to go and look for porn or something ;).

Keep up the great work guys! Don't get discouraged if anybody tells you that it's the most useless thing in the world, people said the exact same thing about twitter, until they began using it and realized it's benefits.

<comment><USER4> An extension is something we defiantly wanted to do from the beginning. That was one issue we saw was either people not wanting to go to seekier or simply when they search they don't go back to seekier. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Site looks pretty well done but it just doesn't seem like something I would use. I have Facebook if I want to share searches with my friends and I can just copy/paste my wikipedia/google/whatever URL there. I have HN, reddit, Digg, etc if I want to do w/ people I don't know IRL but who have the same interests as me.

<comment><AUTHOR> With Seekier, the search terms are the center of the conversation and Seekier is soley built around this focus. Thank you for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd suggest you skip the Google Adsense for now; you could always reconsider later. My first impression was "they want me to click on an ad" - that's their model. And yes, to echo angumagu, I'd recommend a modification to the thumbnail too. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we definitely need to get rid of the adsense and update the thumbnail. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Completely tertiary to the primary feedback being requested, but: Your default avatar (which appears to be a zoom-in of the logo) looks (to me) like a zoom- in of a line drawing of a woman's cleavage, with one nipple showing.

edited: for punctuation

<comment><AUTHOR> Ummm, yes, that's a possible viewpoint. We'll need to change the avatars. Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Your site is really well done but this seems like more of a feature than a stand alone product. What is the most compelling reason a user would have to use this and not an existing sharing service?

<comment><AUTHOR> Seekier is built solely around seeing what people are searching in real-time. When users instantly see what others are searching, they can create discussions around these searches and help each other discover more. Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A typo on <http://seekier.com/account/signup>: "County" should be "Country."

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, thanks for catching that. We'll change that asap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why isn't duckduckgo in the list!?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's currently listed if you selected your country at United States. We'll need to add it to more countries though. Where are you from?</comment></comment>


Website Uses AI to scan poop photos for your digestive health - <AUTHOR> https://www.crappsy.com <comment><USER2> "Sorry, meant to send that picture to someone else"</comment>


Why Can't I Use My Cell Phone on a Plane? Ask Call Carriers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgets/gadgetreviews/magazine/16-09/ts_burningquestion <comment><USER2> You can't use it on a plane because no one wants to be forced to hear someone talk on the phone for an entire 2+ hour flight and we certainly dont want to hear people on planes talking over each other.

<comment><USER3> I'd heard this before, and it just doesn't hold as an argument.

a. Someone can do this now, they just have to pay the rates for in-flight phones.

b. If you're going to ban cell-phones on the basis of how much they annoy other passengers, you'll also have to ban babies.

<comment><USER4> " If you're going to ban cell-phones on the basis of how much they annoy other passengers, you'll also have to ban babies."

I'm in!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The synopsis of the article is that it's technically tricky to enable cell phones but not impossible. The problem is that cell phones hit hundreds of towers from a mile up. Instead enabled planes would have a local cell and use radio noise to block traffic to ground based towers.

The main reason the ban has remained in place is public opposition to sitting next to someone talking on a cell phone. Which makes sense to me. Air travel is hardly comfortable.

</comment><comment><USER6> But, given that there's wifi, you can still use VoIP phones. Those that really need service still have a means of sending their voice down to ground; it just inconveniences those who pay for specific (ground) cell coverage, that's never guaranteed to work outside of its physical region, let alone in the air, anyway.

Also, even if the plane doesn't have wifi, don't satellite phones still work?</comment>


Show HN: React Canvas Example App – Rotten Tomatoes - <AUTHOR> http://vivekpanyam.com/samples/reactcanvas/

<comment><AUTHOR> The source is up here: [https://github.com/VivekPanyam/RottenTomatoesSample](https://github.com/VivekPanyam/RottenTomatoesSample)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It works best on mobile! Try adding it to your homescreen (this should remove the browser's UI chrome).

</comment><comment><USER2> Very slick, works well on my phone. But I dont really get it. What does it do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

It pulls the top 50 rentals from Rotten Tomatoes and displays a poster and information about the movie.

The point of building it was to try out React Canvas and test scroll performance with lots of images.

I suppose it could also help you decide what movie to watch.</comment></comment>


Why Intelligent People Fail - <AUTHOR> http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/works/intelligentfailure.htm <comment><USER2> Some of these are so general as to be useless:

* Giving up too easily or not giving up to easily

* Too little confidence or too much confidence

* Spreading oneself too thin or thick

* Taking too much blame or not taking too much blame

The problem being that there's no way to know (for example) if you're being too confident or not confident enough.

<comment><USER3> Just because they are general they are not useless.

Where the article fails I think is that it takes intelligence to know whether you are giving up too early or not giving up too early. Also, an intelligent person would know or realise at some point whether they are spreading themselves too thin or thick, and do something about it. That is afteral what intelligence is for. Others however might not.Thus the people the article is speaking of seem to be perhaps not that intelligence. Thus "intelligent people" should be taken off the title as it applies more to all people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You could as easily call this _Why People Fail_. None of the points are limited or directly related to intelligent people.

<comment><USER5> I think the assumption is that these are possible reasons for failure after you discarded "not intelligent enough", which indeed could be a pretty valid reason.

The article refers to the remaining branches, thus the title.

<comment><USER4> So you could remove the first item and retitle it _Why Motivated People Fail_? Or the 17th and _Why Patient People Fail_. Hmm.. I could sell this idea to Mahalo ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I quickly read through the list. Not sure if this is in there but I call it "Insight by progress". What I mean by it that you start on something and than halfway through you realize you should have done it differently and rather than sticking with it you start over, again and again...

</comment><comment><USER7> The main reason imho is that they don't understand people, they think everyone is as smart as they are, and this results in trying to create a perfect product which is impossible, and hence, they lose motivation to complete it.

What smart people need to realize is that the rest of the people are not that smart. Proof? They buy virtual goods.

Never assume people will not use your product, this is too big of an assumption. Let them decide because they don't think like you.

</comment><comment><USER8> One more: Over analyzing. :)

<comment><USER9> That largely fits under "unable to see the forest for the trees"

<comment><USER10> I think it was intended as a jab at the author :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm doing an exercise where I go through each of these and attempt to discover whether I have this flaw.

Of course, I'm probably susceptible to the ego / dunning-kruger effect, where I will think I'm less prone to certain flaws than I really am. I'm looking for ways to mitigate this effect. Any ideas?

My first attempt is to try to name someone I respect who has this flaw. The idea is the sucker theory, from poker -- if you can't see the sucker at the table, it's you. If I can't find someone with a particular flaw, I may have that flaw.

</comment><comment><USER12> The most obvious reason:

They are not stupid enough to think they will succeed.

</comment><comment><USER13> The same reason anyone fails: lack of conscientionness. This is the #1 attribute that is needed for success at anything. Most of the list falls into this category.</comment>


Tableflip.club - <AUTHOR> http://tableflip.club <comment><USER2> I think this is really important. It would be very wrong to dismiss it with tone policing or other superficial commentary. The underlying point is that there are a lot of women in the technology industry who believe - rightly - that they are being mistreated.

That's not necessarily to say that the rest of us are doing it deliberately (although some undoubtedly are). But it's important to grow our own awareness and build more inclusive cultures at our startups, and continue to be aware, work on improving ourselves, and, more than anything else, _listen_.

I'm down with Uber for cats though. Maybe with VR and drones?

</comment><comment><USER3> Lots of anger, name calling, blaming, and posturing directed at nobody in particular with no discernible next steps toward resolution. Nothing good will come from this. There's no need to wage war, pick out enemies, and blast people toward a more fair world. If you try to pick a fight you'll get one because that's definitely something we can all do well.

<comment><USER4> > with no discernible next steps toward resolution.

The next steps (expressed as fact statements rather than calls to action) are quite explicit in the last paragraph.

> There's no need to wage war, pick out enemies, and blast people toward a > more fair world.

I don't see any war-waging, just an explanation for the motivations for a well-identified new strategy.

<comment><USER3> Quite explicit? Let me see if I can recount those steps then: follow brave women, talk, organize, share stories about creeps and cowards, incorporate, fundraise, invest, and stop giving fucks.

Great plan maybe if we have time we can include memes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> not trying to discount this or my perceived intent of it, but i was wondering if any women could share specific examples when they were being mentored/coached differently than men. i understand that every individual, man or woman, responds to better to different communication styles.

i'm asking because i specifically want to know what unintended biases/habits I may have that i didn't realize.

thanks!

<comment><USER6> Do you know any women in tech at all?

They would be the people to ask.

<comment><USER7> Except something I read recently said you should not do that either unless they somehow give signs that is something they are interested in. At this point I have just given up. I did ask a woman colleague about this a while ago before I was admonished (via random blog post) and she said she didn't really see the need to tell other women to pursue CS as a profession because those that were interested would gravitate to it like she had. She worries about people doing things just because they pay well or are seen as trendy. Not sure I agree with her viewpoint but there you go...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This isn't material to the actual content of the post, but:

> Uber for cats

Isn't Uber the Uber for cats? [http://blog.uber.com/KITTENS](http://blog.uber.com/KITTENS)

</comment><comment><USER9> "We're ceasing to give any more fucks about your incompetently-run "Uber for cats" app or whatever the fuck your company does."

> You rule.

</comment><comment><USER10> feminist ranting is so 2015?

the grass is always greener on the other side of fence. everyone believes everyone else must have it easier.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is trending all day now, and seems to be getting killed on HN. Curious why mods feel the need to do that.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps because, beyond a Twitter hashtag and a fairly inexplicable emoticon, it doesn't add anything new or interesting to (what usually amounts to) a rather prickly debate.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. Somebody's mad, perhaps justifiably so, but there's no clear plan of action here. I'm not saying it's a bad plan. I'm saying it's _no_ plan, and thus nothing to discuss. Maybe when more details come out about what the tableflippers are actually going to do, that will be newsworthy.

<comment><USER11> Or maybe the onus should be on the male crowd to take action?

<comment><USER14> Well, hysteric anger like this makes me feel both annoyed and accused for things I have had no influence on. Not the greatest way to make me actively support it. In fact it makes me feel negatively.

<comment><USER15> Just in case you weren't aware, "hysterical" is a word that has a heavy sexist history: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/21/female- hysteria_n_4...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/21/female- hysteria_n_4298060.html)

You do have influence on the subtle sexism that creeps into your language, like they word "hysteric" just did. Now you know! Not using it again is a specific thing you can do to make the world a better place.

I suspect that the author of the manifesto felt negatively about her experiences as well. Perhaps you should take those negative feelings and go do something productive, like donate money to a women-in-tech charity, or help a female friend who's unhappy in her career find a new job at a healthier company.

<comment><USER14> I won't let you police what words I use, I had no idea of the history (ESL). If there is a objective source I might reconsider.

You missed my point about the negativity. It makes me not wanting to do anything, that's the problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Topics for a lunch and learn? - <AUTHOR> The dev team at the company I just joined is starting a weekly lunch and learn to share knowledge on some interesting and relevant topics in the development world. As someone who doesn't consider himself a domain expert on any particular topic, I'm a little nervous to participate, yet many people have spoken up with a wealth of topics (webpack/gulp, docker, angular) to talk about. I have interest in all kinds of tech but I've spent most of my career as a backend developer. What are some interesting, innovative topics I could read up on to give me some ideas for a lunch and learn of my own? <comment><USER2> What about introducing them to the world of backend systems where the approach is completely different then front-end apps. Things like distributed state and processing, parallelism, concurrency etc.

Title could be something like "Backend systems - An app that is always running across machines"</comment>


How important is 24/7 support when you startup? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chargebee.com/247-support-startup/

<comment><USER2> The answer is depends. If you are targeting global market and your product is rough on the edges you might want to consider it. We did that for our KiSSFLOW.com</comment>


JekyllConf – The free, online conference for all things Jekyll - <AUTHOR> http://jekyllconf.com

<comment><USER2> YES! :raised_hands:

<comment><AUTHOR> We're really looking forward to your talk! Can't wait :)</comment></comment>


Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/09/why-keeping-up-with-rss-is-poisonous-to-productivity-sanity.ars

<comment><USER2> "Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task."

Okay, I call shens on this whole article.

Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.

The problem they're talking about is checking your RSS feed obsessively - which has exactly the same issues as checking your email obsessively, or your texts, or your Facebook wall, or whatever the heck else that you should stop interrupting yourself with constantly.

"Keeping up" does not have to mean being OCD at the expense of getting work done.

<comment><USER3> Agreed.

I personally go through my RSS feed every few months and re-evaluate my feeds. If I have feeds that have low signal to noise ratios, or simply publishes articles that I never read, I remove them.

Also, I segregated high volume feeds (such as Flickr picture feeds and Gizmodo/NYTimes/BBC etc.) into a separate account. I have two accounts, one (low volume) where I try to take a closer more thorough look at everything, and another (high volume) where I simply do a quick scan then mark all as read.

Don't blame RSS for your inability to manage it.

<comment><USER4> The 'trends' tab in Google Reader is useful to check on that: it gives you both how many items a feed published and how many you clicked on for the last 30 days. This can be useful to confirm the ratios.

Most of my feeds publish only two or three times a week, some even less, but with high signal to noise ratio; that's where RSS really shines, since checking them manually would kill a huge amount of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Enter PostRank:

<http://www.postrank.com/feed/>

For every RSS feed you will get 4 RSS sub-feeds:

1\. Best posts.

2\. Great posts.

3\. Good posts.

4\. All posts.

The ranking (to decide if a post is good/great/best) is done through its popularity online (reddit, digg, delicious, etc.).

When I'm interested in a website I usually subscribe to the best posts sub- feed, sometimes to the great posts sub-feed. This way I'm never overloaded with RSS items to read and I don't miss anything important.

Here are ultra-filtered HN sub-feeds using a feed of HN posts of 150 votes or above:

[http://www.postrank.com/feed/20ad1f84cfa8acedf528c616cd441f6...](http://www.postrank.com/feed/20ad1f84cfa8acedf528c616cd441f65)

Also, here is a JavaScript bookmarklet I created to find the PostRank sub- feeds for the current website you're on:

      javascript:location.href='http://page2rss.com/page?url=+encodeURIComponent(location.href);

EDIT: ReFilter is also very useful if you want to only read posts about a particular topic:

<http://re.rephrase.net/filter/>

<comment><USER6> OMG, thanks a lot. I was struggling with too many reposts and self-promotions by obscure bloggers on HN. This helps a lot. Looks like digg for rss. Subscribed to the best HN posts. Unsubscribed from the original feed.

<comment><USER5> You're welcome. Beware that is a best posts filter from an already filtered feed that contained only posts with at least 150 votes. Here's where the "original" already filtered feed came from:

[http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news- overlo...](http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overload)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The current model of RSS consumption is still broken. For the vast majority of news sources, you really care about headlines and recency rather than read/unread counts. I had a rambling blog post about it a few years ago: <http://bit.ly/rklROK>

My first startup was trying to address some of these issues but we never quite got there. Unfortunately, innovation in the RSS space pretty much stopped (partially because of the adequate, and free, google reader). I keep waiting for someone to pick up the news source / skimming / river of news / feed magazine torch but I haven't seen it yet.

<comment><USER8> River of News: <http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/riverOfNews>

From the guy responsible for the first RSS reader and RSS producers. One of those cases where the pioneer got it right and a lot of the following horde missed one of the key points. I've been using RSS since, well, not quite _day_ one but _month_ one, and River of News is the only way to go.

It's OK to just skim past a lot of articles. If you pop open your reader and don't feel like it, just hit "everything's read" and close it again. You must understand it as a transient view. It's not email, it's a stream, and if you drop some of it on the floor it's not a problem. Nobody will bite you. None of this is an obligation.

Google reader is acceptable as a river of news. I've stopped using local readers, partially because despite only having about 60 feeds, RSS-reader- authors seem nearly incapable of producing halfway performant software and even my modest feed set tends to crash or cause 100% CPU for extended periods of time. (There are some, but cutting down the reader space by the criterion of "what was written competently" means that the apparent space of hundreds is actually only a handful of choices, and most of those aren't very good at the river approach.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ars Technica criticizing RSS while advertising Twitter? With respect to the point of the article, that's a false dichotomy.

Other than that, RSS is universal and decentralized whereas Twitter is a vain, contained and centralized environment.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm personally torn on RSS readers. Admittedly, I'm an almost entirely unproductive person lately, so I can't claim that it's because RSS is getting in the way of other things. My chief suspicion is that as the number of subscriptions goes up, the propensity to fly through headlines rises as well, and so too does the efficiency of applying whatever criteria normally applies in choosing whether or not to read past a headline. What normally would be signal gets converted to noise because of the quantity needed to be consumed. Of course, one can always lower the number of subscriptions, but on the other hand, as one approaches lower bounds, the less sense RSS makes: one can simply and probably with more aesthetic pleasure, just make rounds to the website. Another point: there's more information and more of interest in a website than what gets printed as words in an article or in the images or whatever media that accompanies that article. And this is another suspicious element of RSS readers: they divorce content from the context in which it "originally" appears (scare quotes because of complexity). One can learn a good lot of important stuff about a content provider by looking at that provider's website, layout, design, ad priorities, etc. And not only about that provider, but about just what the hell the web looks like these days. If all I did was read via RSS, I'd probably have no clue. And more over, if all anybody ever did was read via RSS, websites themselves would be something else entirely and that something else probably wouldn't be much to look at.

So really that's two chief suspicions: one, it's hard to find an optimal number of subscriptions (or even if there is such a thing); and two, RSS annihilates the experience of everything it can't contain.

(I said I was torn, but I think I've started to convince myself that maybe I need to ditch Google Reader...)

<comment><USER11> It seems there's a problem that needs to be solved, doesn't it? How's this for a startup idea: "Pandora for RSS"

Users subscribe to a few feeds and provide feedback as to which articles they liked and disliked; the system correlates each individual with other similar users and starts providing suggestions, ratings, and sorts the articles in terms of "quality" that you defined by your votes. Then, as a user, you don't have to read everything - just the best recent posts.

It can be treated more like a tailored/customized version of Reddit or Hacker News. You don't have to "catch up", you just go browse it when you feel like it.

<comment><USER10> This really sounds to me exactly what sub-reddits already accomplish... am I missing something?

In fact, I do use sub-reddits as a kind of rss alternative and for my less frequented ones will sort by Top for last week/month/etc. It works pretty well, but sub-reddits can only get specific to a certain extent, which is where a feed excels in. Say I want to keep up not just philosophy, and not just epistemology but phenomenological epistemology (doesn't matter what it actually is, just that it's highly specialized). No sub-reddit exists for such a thing (or anything like it that is so specialized). And I can rely on /r/philosophy or even /r/epistemology to feed me that content.

What I really need is to get it all straight from the horses' mouths. Since posts are apt to be spread out, it doesn't make sense for me to continually check whatever blog or website for updated content: I want to be alerted when it's updated.

Say I have 50 to 100 such websites of similarly specialized content. The situation will be the same for each, so it seems like it would make sense to get the alerts all in the same place, hence RSS. But the problem is that now there's just too much being pushed, even though each content provider is only pushing a little bit every week, it adds up fast (and this isn't even taking into account more general, entertainment-like content that invariably works its way into the feed).

On the other hand, this is starting to sound less like a problem with technology and more of a problem with my personal information-junkie habits (that are unfortunately self-defeating).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's funny that he says he doesn't need the productivity loss of keeping up with RSS because anything important will show up in his Twitter feed.

<comment><USER13> Who's this _he_ you're referring to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I simply separate my RSS feeds into two folders - A list and B list. A list is for independent writers who only post a couple times a day. B list is for news-centric websites. I do not hesitate to simply mark the entire B list as read.

<comment><USER15> I second this. Triageing feeds is the way to go. Also don't think you can read it all.

<comment><USER16> I think you're missing his point: he separates his feeds into high- and low- volume, and is willing to triage the high-volume subset without missing out on the rest.

I've been doing something similar for a couple of years now. I built <http://readwarp.com> to manage my high-volume sites, and now my google reader's dropped from 1500 feeds to 100 low-volume must-see feeds that generate 10 stories a day.

<comment><USER15> Yea, I don't think I did mis-understand the comment, but I glad you found a place to plug your site.

<comment><USER16> Wow, that is some nasty sarcasm you've got there.

Readwarp's an ancient hobby that I don't work on anymore. Did it seem like I was trying to convert traffic? We all know how to build landing pages with big, bright call-to-action buttons, you know.

I've long since pruned most features on the site. There's no way to import feeds, etc. It only really works for me anymore. I linked to it because it's hard to make sense of custom reading solutions without pointers to try them out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let's step back a little and consider whether it makes sense to blame a document format for our problems.

</comment><comment><USER18> > I combined that with my usual e-mail communications (tips from readers, > conversations with PR folks from different companies, interviews already in > progress, etc.) and my regular scans of Twitter in order to figure out what > was going on during the day. It was stress-free, and I never felt like I was > missing anything—I knew that if something truly important or controversial > blew up, I'd hear about it instantly via Twitter and our loyal readers.

> Sam Stephenson, a programmer at 37signals, agreed. "I gave up on RSS a > couple of years ago when I realized it was just another unread indicator in > my dock, another number to zero out," Stephenson told Ars. "If an article or > link is important it almost always shows up in my Twitter stream, or on one > of the handful of websites I check throughout the day."

I think I see the problem here.

<comment><USER19> Why on earth would you actually check a handful of sites throughout the day if you have RSS? That's what it's supposed to help with. You just have one site (or app), and check that whenever your code is compiling (or whatever), and _it_ checks all the other sites for you.

Actually opening up websites to see if they have something new feels horribly inefficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My RSS reader only refreshes every hour (and there's no easily accessible refresh button or way to force that), and I stick to feeds that get max 1 or 2 updates a day. Problem solved.

Don't blame the technology, blame the way you use it. Of course, subscribing to a high-traffic feed isn't much more effective than just keeping a tab open and refreshing every few seconds. You still have to cut throught the noise. But that's not the point, imo. Rss is great for tracking these obscure blogs that get one or two very well-though updates a week, or even less.

</comment><comment><USER21> If anything I would say that my reader saves me time and distraction. I don't have to search for the information I'm looking for, wasting needless time on links in search that wind up being non-relavent spam. I get to skim through articles that have a higher probability of being relevant to something that I need to know and I get to do this at my leisure.

</comment><comment><USER22> Swapping out RSS for twitter is illogical. They are both RSS but Twitter doesn't have an unread count.

The article instead should have pointed to content browsing solutions that replicate the experience of a newspaper for quick exploration leading to deeper reading.

</comment><comment><USER23> Way back in the olden days, I built a lovely reader (inventively called Reader) at Earthlink.

The key feature to Reader was that it did not have unread counts at all. You could flip through the articles and it would keep keep track of where you were. If you left for more than half an hour, the rest of the articles were marked as read.

It was very liberating to not feel like you were ever trying to keep up with your feeds.

These days, Fever App seems the way to go... <http://feedafever.com/>

<comment><USER24> Fever looks great: rerank high volume feeds by correlation to other feeds I like, mark some feeds like bug reports/commits as read all

... but I cringed so hard when the demo said to set all the files to 777. It's a php app you run on your own webserver and according to the documentation updates itself automatically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't think RSS as a mechanism is the problem here. If anything, it's a problem of oversubscribing to too many blogs and news sites. What's really needed is a better mechanism for providing an overview of these items in a way that allows one to quickly skim over unread items and decide what's worth reading and what's not. Something along the lines of Flipboard or Pulse with ReadItLater support, which already exists for your tablet/phone, but seems to be lacking for desktops (as far as I know. I could be wrong here though).

<comment><USER26> I use proxies to filter my news. Proxies are people like you and every other user of Reddit and HN. These people help me by voting on what stories they think are important. For example, I never go to TechCrunch on my own. Occasionally there will be an interesting article there, and it will show up on HN. It's using the wisdom of the crowd to filter the thousands of articles that are written every day.

Instead of saving stuff to read later, when I want to read something I go to HN and check what's currently on top. I'll almost always find something interesting, and if I check about ounce a day I don't miss much.

<comment><USER25> This is a great idea. But I find that the churn rate for HN is quite high in comparison to reddit, and I need to check HN quite a few times a day to not miss interesting stuff. Also, though this case is probably rare given the shared interests of HN and subreddits, it's still possible that you could miss out on something that you would have potentially found interesting, but the majority did not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just use FeedSpeak (<http://feedspeak.tk>) - an app that reads your RSS feeds to you, so you can listen to articles while doing other things.

<comment><USER10> Unless they've got Morgan Freeman or Tom Waits or Garrison Keillor doing the reading, I'm not sure how you can stand this.

I'm not just being cheeky, either; is listening to voice fonts for extended periods and for complex material just something you have to warm up to?

<comment><USER27> heh, the robotic lady voice was annoying at first, but i got used to it. there is experimental support for custom tts engines built into the app if you want to use different ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The issue with RSS is that you can't put advertisements in it else it'd lose all value. So RSS is not a good thing for sites such as Ars.

In the end you're going to have 3-10 RSS feeds to read max and they're exactly the same ones as the 3-10 sites you were going o read, _except you can easily see headlines_. Instead of putting 200 RSS feeds, which is clearly just as dumb as reading 200 sites (in fact its still easier to read 200 RSS than 200 sites)

And that's that.

<comment><USER4> _> The issue with RSS is that you can't put advertisements in it else it'd lose all value. So RSS is not a good thing for sites such as Ars._

Yes and no. While you'll be less exposed to ads than while visiting the site, RSS also lets the site push content to the user, which can lead to more pageviews than if he had to remember to visit it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Google Reader Notifiers

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/apflmjolhbonpkbkoo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/apflmjolhbonpkbkooiamcnenbmbjcbf) [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kfimchjilnmjmjpdge...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kfimchjilnmjmjpdgedcamjninpdkkpk)

Make checking efficient.

<comment><USER30> Could you elaborate on this? How does it "make checking efficient"? And what is an "efficient check" anyway?

<comment><USER29> Try clicking on the links, you'll see some pictures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A tip: use a service like www.blogtrottr.com to keep up on infrequently- updated RSS feeds. It emails you with an excerpt and link to the full article when one gets published. That way you're not cluttering up your RSS reader with feeds that 95% of the time will show old content or no content.

</comment><comment><USER32> How does sam get what he needs from his twitter stream?</comment>


Rookies in the Bike Shed - <AUTHOR> http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/posts/44-rookies-in-the-bike-shed <comment><AUTHOR> The Rails commit that spurred this post, apparently: <https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/5329>

<comment><USER2> Bah, I can't be bothered to read the whole thing. Before the request was closed, if I understood correctly, the argument was about whether or not `xhr?` needed to return a boolean rather than what it's doing which is aliasing a regex match.

Hmm, call it bike-shedding if you want, but I have to be honest part of the beauty and value of Ruby is how semantic it can be made when you follow some conventions. How hard or awful is it to just actually return a boolean here? I mean is anyone expecting or relying on the clearly undocumented feature that it also returns the offset of where `/XMLHttpRequest/i` is found in the request?

The problem with throwing out the 'bikeshedding' defence is that it goes both ways. It's their choice to fight a small, trivial pull request that appears to make logical sense, and arguably reduces the potential for cognitive friction.

It's debatable who's actually bikeshedding here.

<comment><USER3> Dude, that's deep. You're bike shedding the bike shed. So meta. Turtles all the way down. Touché!

<comment><USER4> Upvoted you despite the slightly obfuscated phrasing, because it's essentially true. This turned into a bikeshedding discussion on bikeshedding the moment lucisferre misrepresented his own definition of bikeshedding as the canonical definition.

<comment><USER2> Did I? Perhaps you could elaborate for my benefit then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And this is why people reinvent the wheel. If you disagree with the core teams decision here, you are at an impasse. So, you fork and move on. Or, you think about it, and decide to create your own framework that will be _like_ Rails, but do things the way you want to do them, including making xhr? work the way you think it should.

Reinventing the wheel gets a bad wrap. People suggest you should contribute to existing projects. The problem is when that existing project's direction diverges from your needs. Reinventing the wheel is part of the power of open source.

On a side note, considering the sheer number of types of wheels, "reinventing the wheel" comes across as a bit odd.

<comment><USER3> This is exactly the point of the original post. That if you're willing to redo Rails because a predicate method does not return singletons, you're a rookie who don't know the value of time.

Of course, people don't actually do this. They talk about doing it, but don't actually carry through.

<comment><USER5> > That if you're willing to redo Rails because a predicate method...

I wasn't clear. My mistake. The issue isn't one of a predicate method, but rather, overall approach. If Rails doesn't work the way you want, you don't whine and complain it doesn't work. You either accept it, or move on and do something better.

The if the attitude demonstrated here is something you can't work with, you move on. It's not just this issue, but every issue like it as well.

I agree with the premise of the post (bike shedding is pointless); however, if you need a garage and not a bike shed, trying to get people who want that bike shed and are building that bike shed to instead build a garage, your better off moving on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I saw one post mention File.world_readable? I don't know Ruby and the result surprised me.

      irb(main):002:0> File.world_readable?('/etc/passwd')
      => 420
      irb(main):003:0> File.world_readable?('/etc/shadow')
      => nil

420 is decimal for octal 0644 which is the permissions on my /etc/passwd file. Fair enough, but as someone looking from the outside it seems weird to leak partial and unreliable information like that. Especially if I was to write

      readable = File.world_readable?('/etc/passwd')

and later readable has an integer in it representing an octal value which can't be used for more than a true/false value. Is it common to throw !! in front of truthy/falsey calls to get down to the boolean literal?

<comment><USER7> It's not a common idiom to use !! in Ruby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This post raises some interesting points about the difficulty of contributing to open source for the first time. Over the last year, I've taught myself to code. I want to contribute to open source, and I think I can provide value to smaller projects. But the public nature and unique culture of open source have left me feeling a bit overwhelmed. So I observe instead.

What's the best way for a rookie to find small, welcoming open-source projects to contribute to?

<comment><USER9> Try to get into a bugmash of some kind. I started this way with Rails and I wrote about it [http://www.rohitarondekar.com/articles/my-first-rails- bugmas...](http://www.rohitarondekar.com/articles/my-first-rails-bugmash)

Many companies and tech groups have these around the world during meetups and conferences.

But most importantly dont let this pull request fool you. Rails is nice to contribute to even if you are starting out and the rails core team especially jose valim and santiago pastorino are super helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I agree this is a good approach for any open source project leader to have.

It's valuable to let rookies argue small debates so they can learn the ropes and get a feel for the community; it's even more valuable for the veterans and leadership to make decisions, set priorities, and maintain focus on what's important. Both are necessary to grow and sustain an open community project. You bring people in and get them engaged whilst reinforcing what the project is focused on, its tone, style, and mission.

Making a decision civilly, whether everyone agrees or not, is very reassuring to newcomers and oldtimers alike. It proves that the community is fun and worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER11> This reminded me a bit of this thread:

<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477#c38></comment>


Metagames and Containers - <AUTHOR> http://www.sleepoversf.com/metagames-and-containers/ <comment><USER2> I'm not terribly convinced by this argument. The author sets up a distinction between achievements and metagames but doesn't really hold to it.</comment>


Iain M Banks doesn't expect to live more than a year. - <AUTHOR> http://www.iain-banks.net/

<comment><USER2> Discussion on the other news item: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5485236></comment>


How and why we defeated DirCrypt - <AUTHOR> https://www.checkpoint.com/download/public-files/TCC_WP_Hacking_The_Hacker.pdf

<comment><USER2> A good way to fight back against ransomware would be to spread false stories in the mainstream media about people who paid the ransom but then didn't get their files back, or their files were corrupted beyond repair, etc.

If both victim and perpetrator are aware of the media stories, it will become more difficult to get them to pay up, making the scam less lucrative.

<comment><USER3> that's stooping pretty low

<comment><USER4> So is creating ransomware.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but the "good guys" aren't supposed to harm innocents, even if it does help in the long term. Well, maybe. But it doesn't feel good at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After reading about ransomware, I adopted the following approach to backing up my files, which I call a "pull" system. I run my backups from an old Linux box that isn't write-accessible on the network, but that can read files from the Windows computers onto the backup disks.

My backup method is slow -- just a bulk transfer of files -- but I've made no effort to refine it yet.

I also wonder: If you plug your backup drive into a Linux box, you'd see if the files were encrypted, right?

<comment><USER6> You may wish to do multiple backups, because otherwise something like this could overwrite your backup when you pull data if you didn't notice it.

If you do incremental / semi-incremental backups, or use a file system with deduplication, your space requirements don't increase that much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if that RSA happens to be _very_ weak too, as evidenced here: [http://blog.cassidiancybersecurity.com/post/2014/02/Bitcrypt...](http://blog.cassidiancybersecurity.com/post/2014/02/Bitcrypt- broken)

In some ways a lot of the crypto used by ransomware might just be "for show" \- to mung files only enough to cause people to pay, as that's the ultimate goal.

<comment><USER8> It's an optimization: if they do it really fast then they can scare you harder because you lose more files.

After all, to a regular end-user bad crypto is indistinguishable from good crypto (and to plenty of programmers too).

<comment><USER9> In general, I would agree, but wouldn't you be using the slow public key crypto only once to encrypt a symmetric key you've previously generated to destroy the files?

I would assume that symmetric encryption still is more than fast enough to be scary, especially with current CPUs and native AES support.

I would think this is more laziness/incompetence of the developer than an optimisation (even more so as in the OP's article, the file were properly(-ish - I would have used AES over RC4) encrypted, but the symmetric key was attached to the file).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great look into the reversing techniques.

Albeit "defeated" is a strong word considering the RSA encryption is still intact - and thus only able to decrypt files larger than, and in range starting from, 1024 bytes.

It recovers potentially large portions, but if your file format can not function without a working header, you're out of luck.</comment>


Quotes of the day: Drucker edition - <AUTHOR> http://www.johnnybunko.com/home/quotes-of-the-day-drucker-edition/ <comment><AUTHOR> Full pdf version of the article "Managing Oneself" from which these quotes are taken is available at [http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=h...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sld.cu%2Fgalerias%2Fpdf%2Fsitios%2Frevsalud%2Fmanaging_oneself.pdf&ei=uvo9SNeMEZ7E0QTK27nyCw&usg=AFQjCNHOPIW_sR_16tyKwhLrMLdlBhPELw&sig2=QWfqrCQwU714PzRnsfBKAw)</comment>